Myrtle Elmer Image: 1929?

I owe Hallie (Gosnell) Keithley, pictured below, for this picture.

                       Back Row L/R: Abbie McGrew, Hallie Gosnell, Addie Pool, Dorothy Pool

                       Front Row L/R: Jewel Elmer, Bobby Pool, O.V. Gosnell, Riley Pool Jr.

     Image taken by Myrtle Elmer (Mrs. Tony), mother of Jewel, pictured above in the dark dress.

My Dad: the School Teacher

Throughout my childhood I met adults from time to time throughout Arkansas County who, regardless of the purpose of our encounter, would some time during our conversation insert the still memorable phrase: "I went to school to your father" or "I went to school to Mr. Woodiel." 

A remark that seemed to me a mixture of both pride and accomplishment.  During their childhood they had, along with a dozen or more of their neighbors, walked varying distances in all kinds of weather "to school" in a one or two room structure in rural Arkansas County to classes taught by my father, the school teacher.

The image below was sent to me in 2005 before I established this site by Lottie Mae (Vernor) Forrest, a high school classmate of mine of the class of 1953 at St. Charles.  It belonged to her mother-in-law, the lady in the polka dot dress near my father Allie Woodiel who stands, his hands behind him, at the right.

Members of the 4H Club, Forrest School, Ark. County, AR 1938

From Lottie's note dated May 7, 2005 that included the above image:

Dale,
   We were going through some old pictures that Johnnie's mother has last Thursday and came across this one.  If Mrs. Forrest lives 'til June 12, she will be 100.  Good mind -- just hard of hearing.  This picture was made at Forrest School in 1938.  It is a 4-H Club group and Mrs. Forrest doesn't remember why she is in the picture, but I'm thinking maybe she was a sponsor or leader.  She is the one in the polka dot dress with white collar.  She said Mr. Woodiel drew her name at Christmas and gave her a green pitcher which Johnnie's niece has.  I just thought you might enjoy having a copy.  Old pictures can certainly bring back lots of memories.

A friend,
Lottie

During the 1930s my father taught in several Arkansas county schools.  These rustic institutions served their purpose in ways that, no doubt still relevant, might well ring true to sensitive classroom teachers here in these beginning decades of a new century.

The image below is clearly my father with another group at perhaps another school.  Although I have no information about this image, other than its obviously him in one of his more dishevelled states, perhaps -- from the number of children wearing rubber boots -- a cold or perhaps rainy day.

Which brings to mind a story recently told to me by my sister Maureen -- she having heard it from man who had, as a young boy, "gone to school" to Mr. Woodiel.  He recalled a rainy day when my father's Model A Ford had become stuck in the mud on the dirt road leading to the school.  The older boys were enlisted to push the car out of the mud, and, though too young to participate in this effort, he joined in the effort and, in the process, caught the strap of his over-alls on the car's rear bumper just as it was releasing itself from the mud, dragging him along with it.  After being dragged through the very muck that had stuck the Ford, a rain of shouts from the muddied assistants brought my father's Ford to a stand still, releasing the youth muddy but unhurt.

Adolph Prange Memorabilia, cont.

The pictures were forwarded to this site by Jim Prange, son of James, one of the oldest children of Adolph and Edna Prange.  [Commentary to follow.]

The Prange Store circa 1913

There is obviously much history to be gleaned from the details of this oldest known picture of the Prange store and family home that rests in the background, its view largely blocked by the trees.



















A dapperly dressed James Prange in the 1940s seated on the eroding boardwalk with the Prange home in the background in front of which is parked what appears to be a slick white-walled sedan. A striking image that has a lot going for it. In addition to the house and car and the decaying boardwalk, there's the stark fence work behind him, what appears to be an oil slick of some sort in the road, and a classic leather jacket one can almost touch.  Since it would be somewhat out of character for his father to allow the boardwalk to fall into disrepair, I wonder if this might have been made after the family had closed the store and moved to California.

I can understand why Jim Prange, to whom I'm indebted for these pictures, says this image of his dad is "about his favorite photo."

The Prange sawmill that stood overlooking the White River a few yards south of the store.

This picture taken by James Prange, whose shadow is revealed in the foreground,  in the early 1950s captures what was clearly the finest dwelling in Crockett's Bluff perhaps to this very day -- depending of course on where one designates the city limits. The house appears to be under construction, a new extension in progress on its west side. There would later be white columns added. Jim Prange, pictured in front next to his sister Judy, his mother's arm on his shoulder, in from of their Aunt Cora Prange and her daughter Ida Carolyn.  Jim remembers this house in an overnight stay as "magnificent."

Adolph Prange Family Memorabilia: the Evolution of the Prange Store

Another post under construction:  

I'm indebted to Jim Prange, the son of James, among the oldest of the nine Prange children, for these fine prints of the A.R. Prange store during the early 1930s, Adolph and Edna during the late 1930s, and David, Charles and Hal in their youth.  The store -- literally overlooking the White River -- holds a key place in my earliest memories -- long before I was eventually old enough to venture southward up the gravel road on those hot summer days, along with every other kid in the area, to swim in the August Prange irrigation canal, just across from Schwab's Store.

The A.R. Prange Store, overlooking the White River: mid 1930?

Apparently the same shot as above but with a different frame that includes the Lutheran Church.

Note the Post Office sign in this frontal view from David's memoir.

Adolph and Edna Prange

David, Lynn (Hal) and Charles Prange

Members of Prange family with parents in back row and Charles with his mit.

The Esso pump and glimpse of Woodiel house in hose loop.

Two Childhood Memories for a Grandson

Here are two childhood memories written for my grandson Griffin Bliss for a project related to Lois Lowry's novel The Giver in his seventh grade English class at St. Andrews School at Savannah, Georgia. 

The first is about my first job at about his age plowing cotton for Mr. George Kline in his field out the Hill Road just west of Voss Lake.  The second is a recollection of the recurrent thrill of all Bluff children at the sound of the whistle of the Mary Woods No. 2

About Your Age 

When I was about your age, a sixth or seventh grader, I was offered my first real paying job.  Something more than the familiar string of unpaid chores assigned to all boys that age who lived on farms in rural Arkansas in the late 1940s.

It was a relatively simple job working on a small cotton farm owned by Mr. George Kline, one of our neighbors in Crockett’s Bluff, a small community at the bend of the White River where I was born and grew up. 

The downside of this job was that I was required to be at his house shortly after sunrise in the morning, not to return until the sun was setting in the evening, a long day.  But the upside was that I was paid what was to me a hefty sum of $2.50 per day.

Since the field where we worked was almost two miles from his house, we rode the horses back and forth each day we would be using in our labors.

 I was required simply to stabilize a plow, pulled by a great buckskin horse appropriately named “Buck,” up and down between the rows of cotton plants uprooting any grass or weeds that might be there.  Mr. Kline came along behind me down these rows with another smaller and more precise plow – pulled by his favorite horse “Lightning” -- that loosened the soil and “cultivated” the plants in their early stages of growth. 

Buck was an enormous so-called “draft” horse, bred for hard and heavy work, and his strength appeared to me to be unlimited.  So, any thought that I, at less than a hundred pounds, was supposed to control his starting, turning, and stopping movements with the reins I leaned into from time to time tied behind my back, was a joke.  Consequently, Buck stopped and turned whenever he pleased, much to my enormous frustration.  

Consequently, since I never gave up trying to control him, from time to time over those sweltering summer days I suffered the modest shame and embarrassment of being gently chastised by Mr. Kline about the quality of the language I addressed to poor old Buck. 

It was a long summer and the work was hard and long and generally hot.  But it was work of the sort one got paid for, and I spent the first twelve dollars I earned on a used red bike with characteristic balloon tires at the Western Auto Store in DeWitt, the county seat of Arkansas County Arkansas. 

 As I rode it for miles over the graveled roads leading in and out of Crockett’s Bluff I felt –what with a paying job – a new sense of what I would now call liberation. 

 *********

The image of an unknown photographer from a Woodiel family album and title image for this site.

The Mary Woods No. 2

The photograph of  the paddle-wheel steamboat pictured above was made from the bank of the White River no more than two hundred yards or so from where I was born in Crockett’s Bluff,  Arkansas, a village in the 1930s much smaller and even more “quiet” and “tired” than the Macomb that Harper Lee describes in To Kill a Mockingbird.  

So, when the steam-whistle of the Mary Woods No. 2 was sounded, everyone, particularly children, dropped everything and headed for the bluff banks overlooking the river. 

 Its sound could be heard long before its barge of logs nosed slowly around the bend beneath the red clay bluffs for which the village was named.  We knew we were in for a treat, something truly awesome to us.  She was majestic: grand and powerful enough to move upstream a barge stacked with logs larger than anyone ever viewed elsewhere.  And she made all the noise necessary to justify her presence, the sound of her engines, the splashing patter of her enormous rear wheel, and the usual additional whistle as a special treat to us from the pilot on the bridge who always returned our waves.

The experience was necessarily brief, since even though she moved slowly when compared with the familiar out-board powered fishing boats, a full view was limited to a panoramic minute or two, so it was necessary to run barefoot down along the bank for the next clear opening with a view.

Then, when she was gone from view and rounding the next bend near the familiar sandbar, her super gigantic waves having reached the shore making the house boats bounce like buoys, we were left with the image above, the Mary Woods with the steam from its twin stacks streaming along its back downstream as it forged upriver its massive barge of freshly cut timber.

A scene that is in memory almost as alive now as it was then – a lingering sensual feast in the midst of an otherwise long,  slow and quiet summer day in a “tired” little hamlet at the bend of the White River.

At the viewing site with my sister Maureen Shireman.

More Pictures In Search of Stories

I have Carol (Keithley) Baird to thank for the images below. 

 Like many "old" pictures, they were  produced from cameras some of which would today be viewed as relatively "stone-aged" when compared with the stark clarity of images produced by even the most ordinary digital device today (even our cell phones).  Gleaned from family albums and various shoe boxes of loose snapshots, they -- along with the stories that often lie behind them -- often provide us with essentially all we know of life in the Bluff during the 1920s and '30s, years when those of us "of a certain age" were youngsters not yet old enough to swim in the Prange canal.

Occasionally, they seem to startle the eye with their classic revelation of curiosity and levity -- evidence of the quality of life of those times, most notably the 1930s, in and around Crockett's Bluff. 

 Like the one of the five young ladies in "Remembering Hazel," the one below of four young men posing on a log is a perfect example: (L-R) Gus McDonald, Joseph Keithley, Russell Marrs, and his brother Herman.

 Though the photographer is unknown to me, the image has all the qualities of a posed portrait: similar flat caps and hands similarly folded, they stare seriously and curiously and unsmilingly into the camera. [There's obviously much to be known about these figures. Russell Marrs, in the decade after his return from the service during World War II was a great influence and inspiration to me, and I'm working on his story for this site.  I seem to recall that Gus McDonald lost a leg in that war.]

L-R: Edna Prange, Alice Keithley, May Bowermaster, and Rose Gosnell

Barbara Cochran, Ida Marilyn Butler, Donna Knowlton, Carol Keithley, Ann Johnson, and "probably Peggy Schwab."

Yvonne Terry, Mary Lou Graves and Carol Keithley

Joe and Alice Keithley and Rose and George Gosnell  (1950s or 60s?)

These images were scanned from photos, some of which are perhaps seventy or more years old.  Although there are ways of improving their clarity somewhat,  some are of subjects too just too far away from the camera to survive enlargement.  Other such images -- with or without the stories behind them -- are welcomed and appreciated for this site.  As I have recently written to Carol Baird: "When folks like us become too senile to identify the subjects in such pictures, they die, along with the stories we know about them."  Preventing such "deaths" is the primary purpose of this site.  Once they are written down they have a fine chance at being passed along to future generations.

Remembering Hazel

Hazel in Her Teens   
Blanche Bowermaster,  Hazel Marrs, Mabel Bowermaster, Hallie Keithley and Rafie Crawford.

Hazel Lee (Townsend) Marrs Barr: December 4, 1920 - February 28, 2012

Visitation: Saturday March 3, 2012 from 10:00 to 12:00 at Clarendon Missionary Baptist Church, Clarendon, Arkansas
Service: Saturday March 3, 2012 at 1:30 P.M. at Clarendon Missionary Baptist Church, Clarendon, Arkansas
Burial: Crockett’s Bluff Cemetery, Crockett’s Bluff, Arkansas


Obituary:
at Houston House Nursing Home, Houston, MO.  She was the daughter of Jeff and Alice Murphy Townsend. She spent her childhood with her family moving up and down White River on a houseboat. Her father was a commercial fisherman and woodsman. Hazel was one of six children, four of who precede her in death along with her parents.

As a young mother.

Hazel married Herman Marrs in 1935 at Crockett’s Bluff where they made their home. To this marriage, four children were born; Joe, James, Glenn and Jeanie.

Hazel will be remembered as a great mother. She was a Christian and joined the Crockett’s Bluff Baptist Church shortly after her marriage. She was faithful in attending along with her children and husband. Hazel taught a Sunday school class there for many years..

Hazel was a very productive mother; she worked hard with her husband to help insure the family had all their needs. She worked in the fall of the year picking cotton along with her children. When the wild pecans in the river bottoms fell, they picked them up to help pay for school supplies. During duck season, Hazel would pick and clean ducks each day to help through the winter and Christmas. She sewed all the families’ clothes and quilts. She sold the duck feathers and the rest she would make wonderful pillows and feather beds.

She raised her family during the depression and post war hard times. Hazel always raised a large garden each year, fattened hogs to eat, made her own soap and rendered her cooking lard.

With a Sunday School Class: Sept. 1955

In the late 50’s, Hazel went to work at the local shoe factory and later worked as a nurse’s aide at the hospital. She worked many years sitting with the elderly in their homes. Hazel also volunteered at the senior citizens center and was a member of the ladies American Legion.

Hazel sold her home in Crockett’s Bluff and moved to Clarendon living close to her sister. She joined the Clarendon Missionary Baptist Church.

Hazel will be remembered for her kindness and giving heart.

Note: I have Hazel's daughter Jeanie (Marrs) Vasseur to thank for forwarding this obituary and for the pictures. DPW

Gus McDonald

Although I could only have been about six when Gus McDonald left for the Army in the months after Pearl Harbor, I seem to recall his coming to our house perhaps the morning he left.  He would later lose one of his legs as a result of injuries received in that great war.  As kids we talked about his "wooden leg," another first phenomenon in our list of new youthful discoveries.

Here he is in his earlier more reckless youth hanging from the framing of the Prange water tower, so long the distant symbol of the Bluff that could be seen from miles around above the tree line across  the prairie.  It is taken from David Prange's Crockett's Bluff as I Remember It from which excerpts can be found in other posts on this site.  In one of my last conversations with David before he died last year he told me to use on my site any of his memories in any way I saw fit.  He admitted he didn't take to "computers and such," so  I doubt he ever saw the excerpts I've posted on this site.  His work, however, is filled with interesting -- even if not always absolutely accurate -- information about the Bluff in those years when the Adolf Prange Store was a major institution there.  He emphasized, he insisted, the "as I Remember It" part of its title.

Crockett's Bluff School Buses 1930s

Google's maps makes the route clear.**

From Schwab's Store in Crockett's Bluff to St. Charles High School was about 10.5 miles.  Straight south for about five miles on Route 153 and then east on Route 1.  This was the basic bus route to the school from at least the 1930s until the school was closed.  It was the route taken by the driver of a Model T Ford version whom David Prange identifies as "Miss Bessie? Dallas" -- shown below along with passengers Edgar and Bobby Turner.

It was likewise the same route I took when during my senior year 1952-3 I was hired to drive a relatively modern version compared with the Ford T.  It had not only relatively conventional glass windows that could be lowered during the hot days of spring and fall but also a fairly decent heater during the winter months when most of my riders willingly sat toward the front to relish its advantages.

Our Principal Charles Downs thought it made sense, since I lived essentially at the end of the route, to save a clear fifty-percent of expenses by my simply keeping the bus under the old oak tree at our house overnight.  I do recall I doubled back a mile or so west of the Bluff in order to pick up Roger McCallie; otherwise, students who lived close to the Woodiel house caught the bus there.   Along the ten mile route students walked out from the homes to the bus route to be picked up.

Though it might appear little short of astonishing today that I, a barely 18 year old senior, was placed  in charge of perhaps twenty or so students -- first grade through twelfth -- there was, to my knowledge not a single complaint. My word was law, and any student (and there were two or three) who presented me with a problem was treated to a free ride straight up to his door.  In those days, believe it or not, he knew he was in serious trouble if I had to speak to his mother about his behavior. 

Though I suspect somewhere there is a picture of the bus I drove -- one only slightly more modern than the late 1930s model shown below with "Miss Cora" Prange and her children August and Ida Carolyn -- but I've so far been unable to find one.

Obviously, there's much more to be said about this experience -- particularly in the contrasts of values it reflects and the confidence and responsibility of high school students -- but let this be it for the moment.  [Again, I'm grateful to Jean Prange for this picture.]

  **[The Rt. 1 extension around St. Charles was completed when the bridge replaced the ferry across the White River in 1982.]

Memories of Jack

Rare pic: Under the Old Pecan Tree at the Bluff

Neil, Bill, Maureen, Dale, Jack and Shelby

Memories of Jack

Since I was probably less than six years old in 1941 when my oldest brother Jack (actually Allie Loftin, named for his father and his mother's brother) left for the Navy, I remember little before that of him except for certain vague recollections of his driving the Arkansas A&M sports bus around the US before he left college to join the Navy.  I was too young to have memories of his being at home during my early years before he left for college.  He was actually not known to me as Jack but as "Bubber," my derivative of Bubba, apparently.

There are, however, foggy images -- probably more fantasies than memories, perhaps products of my imagination in response to overheard conversations of my parents, such as his high school days at St. Charles High School provoked by a school photo of him in a neat sleeveless striped sweater.  One mental image, however, of him standing in the kitchen next to the old cast-iron wood stove -- from my view the single light bulb hangs from a single twisted wire next to his face -- on the morning he left for the service remains clear and probably valid.

During the war years our family spent in the Highland Park Housing Project in Little Rock, Jack was represented by a single service star flag that was hung in the front window.  When my brother Bill entered the Navy after high school, another flag with two stars was substituted.

Jack was eventually to be stationed at Pearl Harbor, another marvelously provocative name that I was introduced to abruptly on the morning of December 7, 1941, when Daddy and I returned with a load of wood to our house just outside of DeWitt, when Mother rushed out of the house to tell us that "the Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor."  Though at that age "harbor" was a little vague, I did know what a pearl was, but the combined image produced by the sound of the two words was puzzling.

And then there is in my memory a clear picture of Jack walking down from the river road at the top of the lane and then up the hill to our house in his white sailor uniform.  I seem to have heard the car stop there to let him off, perhaps, and I watched as he walked up, perhaps even calling to Mother as he did so.

It might have been during this return visit, or perhaps a bit later when I was a bit older, that he related to me the story of his failed marriage as we were driving  back from DeWitt to the Bluff on one of his visits.  Since I was much too young -- ten or eleven -- to understand the significance of his unfortunate state, I have often wondered why he chose or bothered to relate it to me.  Perhaps he just wanted to vent his feelings one more time.  He didn't appear angry; he didn't shout or curse; he didn't even raise his voice much; but he made it clear to me that his wife Margarite Moon (I thought the name quite exotic, since I had never heard of anyone named Moon before) had not only been involved with another man while he was in the service but had also spent the money he had been sending home to establish their post-war future.

Although he appeared to have resigned himself to these realities, he had also concluded that it "was now time for him to have a little fun for a change," or words to that effect.  Perhaps this was his way of saying that his having apparently been faithful to her during his war years away had cost him something that needed to be compensated.

I'll never know, but looking back now with a bit of life experience of my own, my best guess is his feelings must have been more complicated than even he understood.  Nevertheless, I understood on that afternoon in the car he had been hurt and deceived and wronged, even though the degree of these grievances was unclear, at least to me at that age.

After this visit, he became in future years more the subject of letters received and sent than a presence in the family.  But there were the occasional brief visits, among which the most memorable was the one on which he brought along Alta Arnold.  After that, I cannot recall seeing him alone again; they would be a pair to his dying day. [Enlistment mug shots courtesy of Loftin Woodiel and the National Archives. DPW March 28, 2006.

Crockett's Bluff Easter Egg Hunt: circa 1930?

This image provides an excellent example of the merit of old photographs, regardless of their condition.  Unfortunately this one suffers from a flaw in the development process, quite sharp and clear in its lower half and yellowing and losing its sharpness in the faces of the figures in the back row.  It appears to be an Easter egg hunt at the great Prange yard at the Bluff directly across from the Prange water tower, for so long the landmark of the Bluff.

Not great quality but clear enough to preserve images of people, two of my brothers and others I would know well in my youth -- though it was probably taken before I was born.  Youthful ghosts from the past -- found in one of "Miss Cora's" albums -- thanks to Jean Prange.

The second from the left (standing) is my brother Bill.  My brother Shelby is standing slightly to his left and front with his hands folded.  I think next to Shelby is Betty Anderson with her brother Bud sitting on the ground (dark jacket) near August Prange (with his head tilted)..  Ida Carolyn Prange is in the center obviously, holding an Easter basket.  I think Neva Graves' sister Willine? is directly behind her, second from right..

I don't recognize anyone else, but there must be folks alive who do.  There are no doubt stories behind such a picture.  An annual affair?  Who might these other children be? 

DPW